This Week's Apple and Desktop Mac News

Mac notebook and other portable computing is covered in The 'Book Review. iPad, iPod, iPhone, and
Apple TV news is covered in iOS News
Review. Older Macs are covered in Vintage Mac News. All prices are in US
dollars unless otherwise noted.

Software

News & Opinion

Apple Now World's Most Valuable Brand

PR: The global brand value ranking eurobrand global 100 by
eurobrand, the European independent experts for brand, patent & IP
valuation & strategy, examining more than 3,000 brand corporations
and their brands in 16 industries, with comparisons of Europe, America,
and Asia.

The most valuable global brand is Apple with a
brand value of €100,239 bn, followed by the brand portfolio of the
Coca Cola Company representing a value of €59,978 bn, and
Microsoft with a brand value of €53,973 bn. The Global Top 10 are
all US-based.

The global brand value ranking eurobrand global 100 by eurobrand the
European independent experts for brand, patent and IP valuation and
strategy - examining more than 3,000 brand corporations and their
brands in 16 industries, with comparisons of Europe, America and
Asia.

2. Europe leading in old brands, North America is strong in new
brands. Europe is the continent of consumer goods representing the old
brand business, North America is strong in IT&technology
representing the new brand business, Asia takes the best of both other
continents and grows the fastest.

3. Small European countries worldwide leading in brand contribution
to the economy. Contributing to the actual discussion in Europe: brand
corporations of small countries like Austria, Denmark, Finland,
Luxembourg, Sweden and Switzerland create the highest contribution to
their economy and are therefore global leaders concerning the brand
value to GDP ratio.

4. Europe is built on SMEs with strong brands. Brand and IP
valuation, analysis and reporting, IP value oriented management and
company structures evolve as key tasks also for small and medium-sized
enterprises, which are important for the development of Europe and
globally.

eurobrandforum 2012

Upcoming eurobrandforum on October 17, 2012 in Vienna gathers
international brand decision makers, discussing the future of brands,
their development, management and organization for value
generation.

Google Drive Is the New Home for Google Docs

PR: Google has
announced that Google Docs has been merged into its Google Drive Cloud
service, and you can access your Google Docs files anytime at
drive.google.com. You can still do everything you could before, like
create, share, and collaborate with Google documents, spreadsheets, and
presentations. Now you can access your stuff anywhere, making it much
easier to upload and sync your files across all your devices, to find
files faster, and to work with more web apps.

Features

Find files faster. Look for files by keyword and Drive
searches everything even text within scanned documents or images
without any text at all. Drive also comes with a simplified navigation
to help you better organize your files, and there's a new grid view to
help you see thumbnails at a glance. Learn more about the new look and
how to find your files.

Beyond Google Docs, Drive now works with other web apps.
Google Docs are now stored in Google Drive, so you can continue to work
with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Plus, Drive is integrated with a growing number of third-party apps, so
you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website
mockups all in one place. With Google Drive, you can quickly view many
file types online, including PDFs, Microsoft Office files, and many
image file types.

Any file that you upload or sync to Google Drive and don't convert
to a Google Docs format can be accessed through the Google Drive
viewer. To do so, click on the file's title in Google Drive on the web
or by following a link shared with you.

Here are some things you can do from the Google Drive viewer:

Show revision history of the file (if you have owner or edit
rights)

Change the sharing settings (if you have owner or edit rights)

Download and print by going to the File menu and selecting Download
as...

Search text on the page using the search box in the upper
right.

Add your comments in all types of files.

Only files under 25 MB can be previewed with the Google Drive
viewer.

Supported File Types

Google Drive viewer helps you preview over 16 different file
types:

Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .TIFF, .BMP)

Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV,
.FLV)

Text files (.TXT)

Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML, .PHP, .C, .CPP, .H, .HPP, .JS)

Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)

Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)

Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)

Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)

Apple Pages (.PAGES)

Adobe Illustrator (.AI)

Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)

Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF)

Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)

Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)

PostScript (.EPS, .PS)

TrueType (.TTF)

XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)

Google Drive is also connected directly to Gmail. If you receive an
attachment in Gmail, you can click the View link, which will display
that file attachment through the Google Drive viewer.

Search Your Uploaded Files

You can search for text in PDF and image files by:

Typing a query in the search box in Google Drive on the web.

Opening the Google Drive viewer and using the search box in the
upper right.

You'll be able to search the first 100 pages of any text documents
or text-based PDFs that you've uploaded. You'll also be able to search
for text found on the first ten pages of any image PDFs on your
Drive.

Offline Access

Access Google Drive even when you're not connected to the Internet.
- Internet outages and long plane rides shouldn't prevent you from
working in Google Drive. Set up offline access so that the next time
you're offline you'll still be able to view Google documents and
spreadsheets, shuffle folders around, and edit non-Google Docs files
stored in your Google Drive folder.

You can view Google documents and spreadsheets without an Internet
connection. You can also edit Google documents while offline. View
access isn't available for Google presentations, forms, or drawings.
Learn more about using Google Docs offline.

Non-Google Docs Files That You've Stored in Google Drive

You can both view and edit files such as PDFs, Microsoft Office
files, and images, from your Google Drive folder even when you're
disconnected from the Internet. Any changes you've made to synced files
while offline will sync to all devices with a time stamp when you
reconnect to the Internet.

Google Drive offers 5 GB of free cloud storage - and 25 GB for less
than $2.50 per month.

Google Drive clients support Windows XP and later, Mac OS X 10.7
Lion and later, Android 5.1 and later, and iOS 5 and later. It can also
be accessed with most modern web browsers, although Google specifically
recommends Chrome.

Apple Updates

Apple Releases OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2
Update

The OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.2 update is Ready to install via
Software Update, is recommended for all OS X Mountain Lion users and
includes new features and fixes.

You can also download the manual update installer, your editor's
preferred method and also a useful option when you need to update
multiple computers but only want to download the update once. These
versions of the standalone installers are available from Apple Support
Downloads.

Apple Releases OS X Update 10.7.5, Adds
Gatekeeper

The OS X Lion 10.7.5 update is recommended for all OS X Lion users
and includes general operating system fixes that improve the stability,
compatibility, and security of your Mac. It also includes the
Gatekeeper security feature that was introduced with OS X 10.8 Mountain
Lion that helps you keep your Mac safe from malicious software by
giving you more user control over what apps are installed on your
Mac.

The OS X 10.7.5 Lion update also includes fixes that:

Resolve an issue where icons in Launchpad may get rearranged after
a restart

Products & Services

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual,
Mountain Lion Edition

PR: Ready to move to
the Mac? This guide helps you make a smooth transition. New York
Times columnist and Missing Manuals creator David Pogue gets you
past three challenges: transferring your stuff, assembling Mac programs
so you can do what you did with Windows, and learning your way around
OS X.

Learning to use a Mac is not a piece of cake, but once you do, the
rewards are oh-so-much better. You won't find questionable firewalls or
inefficient permissions. Just a beautiful machine with a thoroughly
reliable system. Whether you're using Windows XP or Windows 7,
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition
(O'Reilly Media, $29.99) has you covered.

Re-create your software suite. Big-name programs from Microsoft,
Adobe, and others are available in both Mac and Windows versions, but
hundreds of other programs are Windows-only. Learn the Macintosh
equivalents and how to move data to them.

Learn OS X Mountain Lion. Once you've moved into the Macintosh
mansion, it's time to learn your way around. You're in good hands with
the author of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, the #1 best-selling
guide to OS X.

The author, David Pogue, Yale '85, is the weekly personal-technology
columnist for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning tech
correspondent for CBS News. His amusing tech videos appear weekly on
CNBC. And with 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world's
best-selling how-to authors. In 1999, Mr. Pogue launched his own series
of amusing, practical, and user-friendly computer books called Missing
Manuals, which now includes 100 titles.

Free Ebook: Hard Drive Troubleshooting

PR: Software and Computer Systems Company, LLC (SCSC) has
just released a new, free ebook in PDF format title "Hard Drive
Troubleshooting." The book, which is 141 pages in length is available
for free download to any interested users from SCSC's web site

"This book is provided to complement our hard drive scanning and
analysis tool, Scannerz for Mac OS X," says an SCSC spokesman. "If
someone thinks they have a hard drive problem, we thought it would be a
good idea to release a book explaining how they can test and evaluate
their problems without possibly buying an unneeded hard drive, or for
that matter, software. Although the book references our product,
Scannerz for Mac OS X, the fact is Scannerz, or for that matter any
other analysis tool on the market cannot and will not be able to
identify a problem that appears to be a drive problem, when in fact it
may be traced to something else, like a failing power supply. This book
traces the data flow all the way from the I/O controller on the logic
board to the read and write heads actually exchanging data with the
drive platters. We hope this book will become the de facto standard
reference manual for hard drive and system problems on Mac OS X based
systems."

"Through years of analysis and experience, we've determined that
hard drive related problems can range from the obvious to the obscure.
Examples of obvious failures would include a logic board with a bad I/O
controller or CPU, a failed controller on a hard drive, or a severe
head crash rendering a drive useless. Obscure problems, which are every
bit as, if not more common as obvious problems, can include such things
as cracks in traces on the logic board, a weak solder joint, or
connectors that are marginally functional. Obscure problems typically
yield extremely erratic system performance, often with intermittent
errors, leading users to believe they have a severe, unrepairable
problem, when in fact it it might be easily fixed. The purpose of this
document is to provide owners with a set of procedures that will allow
them to at least understand what's going wrong, and in many cases, fix
it."

Topics covered by the book include the following:

Definitions of failure and problem types

Descriptions of how particular failures and problems effect
systems

Identification of problems and failures on internal and external
drive systems

Software problems that can appear as drive or system problems

Remapping bad sectors to good sectors on a drive with platter
damage

Dealing with drives that aren't visible to a system

Dealing with drives or systems behaving erratically

Dealing with drives or systems suffering from intermittent lockup
or shutdown

Dealing with drives or systems suffering periodic crashes

The book is intended for users using systems that typically fall
into the following categories:

Although the book is clearly targeted at users using Apple Macintosh
based systems, the general theory is applicable to almost any Mac or PC
based system. SCSC invites anyone interested to download the book from
their website.

PR: Western Digital's HGST subsidiary (formerly Hitachi
Global Storage Technologies) has announced a new helium-filled hard
disk drive platform, which the company says is in the vanguard of
advanced hard drive technology for increasing capacity and
significantly reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise and
cloud customers especially.

With products expected to ship in 2013, the new platform enables
HGST to go beyond its award-winning five-platter design, providing a
path for higher capacity storage and lower customer TCO for years to
come. With industrywide challenges in scaling current areal density
technologies, this new platform allows HGST to design seven-platter
drives in a standard 3.5" form factor that it claims will
cost-effectively extend the capacity and cost-per-gigabyte curve for
many product generations to come. In addition, the inherent benefits of
the platform, including the helium fill, allow HGST to significantly
improve datacenter TCO on virtually every level: capacity, power,
cooling and storage density.

New Platform for Reducing TCO

With the explosion of data resulting from mobile devices, Internet
services, social media and business applications, corporate, cloud and
big data customers are constantly looking for ways and means to improve
their storage infrastructure costs and their bottom line. Also, HGST
says that new storage models, such as cold storage, are evolving in
ways that require enormous amounts of data to be stored and available
within a moment's notice. These hyperscale datacenters must deploy
massive amounts of storage with the best TCO to help them manage their
costs and growing storage needs. And when it comes to TCO, numbers
matter most cost-per-terabyte, watt-per-TB, TB-per-system weight and
TB-per-square foot.

The density of helium is one-seventh that of air, delivering
significant advantages to HGSTs sealed-drive platform. The lower
density means dramatically less drag force acting on the spinning disk
stack so that mechanical power into the motor is substantially reduced.
The lower helium density also means that the fluid flow forces
buffeting the disks and the arms, which position the heads over the
data tracks, are substantially reduced allowing for disks to be placed
closer together (i.e., seven disks in the same enclosure) and to place
data tracks closer together (i.e., allowing continued scaling in data
density). The lower shear forces and more efficient thermal conduction
of helium also mean the drive will run cooler and will emit less
acoustic noise.

"The benefits of operating a hard drive with helium fill have been
known for a long time. The breakthrough is in the product and process
design, which seals the helium inside the hard drive enclosure cost
effectively in high-volume manufacturing," says Steve Campbell, chief
technology officer at HGST. "We are excited about the introduction of
this platform, which demonstrates HGST technology leadership and is the
result of more than six years of development in materials science,
mechanical engineering and process technology. Thanks to the hard work
of our research and engineering teams, our initial pilot lines are up
and operational, putting HGST in position to introduce this technology
first into the market."

"As a technology innovator, HGST continues to invest in multiple
R&D efforts that will help us win new customers, gain deeper market
penetration and deliver a significant return on investment for our
customers," comments Mike Cordano, president of HGST. "Our new
breakthrough platform delivers unprecedented innovation with new
features optimized to meet the performance, scalability, efficiency and
TCO demands of both corporate and cloud datacenters, which could not be
achieved using conventional techniques. With these improvements,
customer interest has been positive and we look forward to qualifying
our new drives in 2013."

The new, helium-filled sealed-drive platform was demonstrated this
week at the Western Digital Investor event in Irvine, California. At
the event, HGST compared the power consumption between a helium-filled
drive and an equivalent air-filled drive side-by-side, demonstrating a
reduction in power consumption for the helium-filled drive of 23
percent. Taking into account the extra capacity coming from two
additional disks, the improvement in watts-per-TB is 45 percent. In
addition to consuming less power, the drive operates four degrees
Celsius cooler, requiring less cooling in the system rack and data
center. This reduction in power and associated cooling cost
significantly contributes to the lower TCO of the helium-filled
platform. The critical watt-per-TB metric will further improve over
time as the helium-filled drive platform enables significantly higher
drive capacities in future product generations.

HGST will release specific capacities points and product
specifications when the platform launches in 2013.

Software

Launchpad Manager for Lion and Mountain Lion

PR: Launchpad Manager lets you delete any icons from
Launchpad.

Launchpad Manager for Lion and Mountain Lion

Note: This will not uninstall your app, it only remove the icon!
Available in free and pro versions.

Features

Available in Free (partially crippled demo) and Pro Versions

Delete any Icons or Groups in Launchpad

Rename any of your Icons or Groups

With the Quick Select buttons can tidy up your Launchpad with a
couple of clicks!

Cut and Paste for moving things around quickly

Organise Groups - Select icons and move them into a new group with
a single click

Add missing applications to Launchpad

Simple Drag'n'Drop Reordering

Save Layout

Load Layout - restore a previously saved layout

Alphabetical Ordering of icons

Move Icons to another page

Move icons to a new page

System requirements: Mac OS X Lion 10.7 or Mountain Lion 10.8

In order to unlock all the Pro features you must purchase a license
for $7.99. A single license can be used on up to five computers.

GIMP Robust Freeware Image Editor Reviewed

AppStorm's Drew DuPont notes that when it comes to image editors,
Adobe Photoshop remains the gold standard for professionals. But for
students, amateurs, or anyone starting their career, the $700 price tag
(or even ~$200 with a student discount) is likely prohibitive. There
are cheaper apps available, such as Acorn and Pixelmator, but they
offer far fewer features.

Luckily, says DuPont, there's the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation
Program), a completely free and open source image editor that nearly
matches Photoshop's versatility. It's long been available on the Mac if
you had X11 installed, but it never looked the part of a high quality
Mac app.

However, DuPont says that's all changed with the latest 2.8.2
release of GIMP, which shipped as a fully native Mac app, which
prompted him to take a closer look at the most popular Photoshop
alternate.

A graphic designer, DuPont knows his way in and out of Photoshop,
but says that the moment he loaded up the GIMP, he was astonished at
the similarities between this free program and Adobe's expensive giant,
noting that the interface in GIMP Version 28.2 bears a striking
resemblance to Photoshop CS6 - down to the coal-gray color scheme and
the palette dock on the right.